Attacking left-back Allen Tankard signed YTS forms for Saints in the same month that Lawrie McMenemy departed for Sunderland. With Chris Nicholl yet to be appointed in succession, trainee Tankard was introduced to the first team, in a pre-season friendly, a mere two months past his 16th birthday.

Still just short of 17 when he made his League debut, Allen had by then won England U-17 honours. He seemed destined for a bright future with the club, yet all of his appearances were made before he signed professional forms at 18. Nicholl sold him to Third Division Wigan a year later.

Looking back at what was a “massive disappointment” at the time, Allen links his dip in form to weight problems – not unconnected with his well-meaning landlady’s fondness for her frying-pan. “It couldn’t happen today,” he reflects, “with the emphasis on diet and nutrition.”

Adjusting well to life in Division III, Allen re-launched his career. He had featured in more than 200 League games in his five seasons with Wigan, by the time they were relegated in 1993. John Rudge, who had succeeded ex-Saint John McGrath as manager at Port Vale, paid £87,500 to keep Allen in the third tier. The Valiants immediately gained promotion and Allen had six seasons with them at that level, until they went down again. In 2000-01, their first season back in the third tier, he was a regular both in the League and in the early rounds of their LDV Vans Trophy-run. He was an unused sub as Vale won the Final at the Millennium Stadium, but he had now played more than 300 times for the club.

For the whole of this time, ex-Saint Martin Foyle was there, whether as player-coach or managing the Reserves, impressing Allen as a “top man: brilliant.” While comfortable with Rudge’s management style, Allen was less enamoured of his successor, Brian Horton. So he was happy to join fourth-tier Mansfield Town, then managed by Billy Dearden, who had been Rudge’s assistant at Vale Park. The Stags were promoted in Allen’s first season, rather setting the seal on a rock-solid career, following the early disappointment at Southampton.

A series of niggling injuries sidelined him for 2002-03 and he was now done with the Football League, in which he had made more than 500 appearances. He played non-league football, part-time, for a while, as he moved into coaching – with his father-in-law’s coach company. Since 2004, he has been running his own minibus company, based in Stone, Staffordshire, in which capacity he “coached” a party of Stoke City fans to Wembley, for the 2011 FA Cup Final. Having always kept a weather-eye on the Saints’ progress, Allen did so even more keenly during the tenure of Nigel Adkins, who had been his goalkeeping team-mate at Wigan.